


Habit

by mammothluv



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Female Characters, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-13
Updated: 2010-01-13
Packaged: 2017-10-06 06:01:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/50446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mammothluv/pseuds/mammothluv
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Izzie doesn't see the beach anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Habit

**Author's Note:**

> Grey's Anatomy belongs to Shonda Rimes and ABC. I'm not making any profit and no copyright infringement is intended.

Izzie doesn't see the beach anymore. Sometimes she wishes she did. Not long ago, she didn't even have to close her eyes and she'd be on the beach with the sun warming her skin and the sand soft under her feet. She was dying and she knew it but she had an escape.

Now she has reality and reality is harsh in ways it wasn't before. Colors are muted; voices seem too loud. As she sits here on her mother's front porch, the wind is rough against her skin. She feels the cold through every inch of her body despite the blanket she's wrapped around herself tightly. The crunching sound of the kids next door running across the gravel drive is like thunder in her ears. Her head started aching two days ago and hasn't stopped since.

Her mother is everywhere, making this about her. Izzie hears her talking to anyone who will listen about her poor daughter and everything she's been through - cancer, a broken marriage, a dead friend. It sounds like it's about Izzie, but it isn't. It's about her mother's need for drama. Sometimes Izzie even pretends it isn't her. She starts to feel sorry for this poor woman her mother is talking about. She can't imagine how anyone could endure so much pain, so much loss.

Her phone rings, interrupting her thoughts. She doesn't answer. She's missed hundreds of calls since leaving Seattle. Except for one brief call to Alex, she doesn't return them. When they spoke, he didn't sound like her husband anymore. She's not sure if that's his fault or hers but she can't stomach the thought of talking to him again. She feels so far removed from him and it's not the physical distance. She could hear the familiar din of the hospital in the background as they spoke. All she could think was that the hospital is a world he belongs to now and she doesn't.

The fact that Alex questioned her abilities stings more than losing her job. She believed in her husband; she believed in surgery. She doesn't have either of those now. Izzie can handle people doubting her, they always have. She's used to proving she's more than the girl from the trailer park who took her clothes off to pay her way through med school. But Alex isn't everybody else; he was supposed to believe in her the way she believed in him.

The messages that aren't from Alex are mostly from Meredith. Though she can't bring herself to answer, Izzie listens to every one. Some are short: "Iz, call me. Seriously." Some are endless rambling monologues that take up her entire mailbox until she deletes them. Those are about everything from what cereal Meredith ate that morning to how many surgeries Meredith is missing out on while she's at home recovering.

Meredith probably doesn't realize how much that one word stings. _Surgery_. Izzie's not a surgeon anymore, not a practicing one anyway and it's the practicing part that counts. She's had her second chance at Seattle Grace; she knows she won't get a third. The thought of trying to start over somewhere else, especially now, is overwhelming.

The part of her that's most like pre-cancer Izzie yearns for the days when she and Meredith would curl up with George in his bed and commiserate over ice cream and booze. Things seemed so difficult then; she realizes now that they weren't.

George's death is still a searing pain in her chest. She'll never be okay with living in a world without him in it. George was the kind of person who joined the Army and threw himself in front of a bus to protect a complete stranger. Izzie, on the other hand, has apparently become the kind of woman who runs home to her mother and sits on the couch eating chocolate cupcakes while waiting for the results of daytime TV paternity tests. Given that and the fact that she has terminal cancer and George was perfectly healthy, she's aware of the irony that she's the one of them still breathing.

But, she is. She's alive. She's the five percent. There has to be a reason.

She's always been an optimist. Even as a kid, she was smart enough to realize there was nothing but failure ahead of her unless she made her own way out. So she smiled; she faked confidence and positivity until she felt it. She willed her way out of the trailer park, into medical school and all the way to Seattle Grace. She fought for every inch of the life she had before cancer. She's tired of working so hard. She always thought one day it would stop being work -- being happy, being optimistic -- and she'd just be all of the things she'd pretended to be for so long. She wonders sometimes now if that day will come, if she'll live long enough.

So, yes, even with all it means, even though it means she'd by dying from cancer instead of living with it, sometimes just for a second she wants to see the beach again. But, it's just a second. And then, some part of her that she can feel getting stronger again, reminds her to have hope. Hope, no matter how unreasonable, has become a habit.


End file.
